December 2013

Alison J. Moskowitz, MD, is among researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and elsewhere who are investigating an expanded role for the CD30-targeting brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) in hematologic malignancies. Moskowitz specializes in the treatment of patients with lymphoma and her research focuses on evaluating novel treatments for Hodgkin lymphoma.

The cytokine receptor CD30 was identified as an attractive anticancer target more than 30 years ago

Awake craniotomies are traditionally reserved for, but not limited to, tumors involving the primary motor and speech areas

There has been considerable discussion within the oncology literature during the past several years regarding the level of evidence required to consider a new antineoplastic agent an acceptable "standard-of-care" in routine disease management.

When Bernard Fisher, MD, first became involved in breast cancer research, the only treatment option available to patients was the radical mastectomy, a horribly disfiguring surgery that had been the undisputed standard of care since the late 1800s

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is a novel, fast, safe, and low-cost technique that uses near-infrared light to provide three-dimensional data on tissue vascularity without the use of radiation.

The FDA's rules for approving new drugs for the treatment of women with ovarian cancer pose frustrating problems for researchers developing novel agents and for clinicians seeking to improve outcomes for their patients

With the arrival and incorporation into clinical practice of immunomodulatory drugs (IMiDs) and proteasome inhibitor therapy, patients with multiple myeloma are achieving deep, durable responses and disease control, and are living longer.

Antiangiogenic agents hold promise in gynecologic cancers, as evidenced by their single-agent activity in malignancies including ovarian cancer, recurrent endometrial cancer, and cervical cancer.

How should the dose and schedule of antineoplastic therapies be modified in patients with known chronic liver, cardiac, or pulmonary disease when these conditions were excluded from the trials that permitted their routine clinical use? How should treatment be changed in the presence of significant obesity?

Between 2007 and 2011, a collaboration among clinical oncologists, pathologists, and industry scientists led to the identification of a new molecularly defined subset of non-small cell lung cancer, followed by the finding that crizotinib, then under development as a MET inhibitor, was an inhibitor of anaplastic lymphoma kinase.

Two years after the FDA denied a request to expand the indication of finasteride and other 5α-reductase inhibitors to prevent prostate cancer, a major study has cast doubt on the concerns that prompted the denial: that the drug raised the risk of more lethal cancers.

A new study has shown a possible correlation between men with short-ended chromosomes in the immune cells of their blood and an increased risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer, potentially pointing the way toward an accessible biomarker that could help inform treatment and surveillance decisions.